What does censorship sound like?

Golden Shield Music is an art project which uses web censorship
technology to compose a generative piece of music.

Created by Italian artist Marco Donnarumma (pictured,
above), the project aims to highlight the issue of internet
censorship, particularly in China. The piece takes its name
from the name China has given to its censorship programme, the
"Golden Shield Project", more colloquially known as the "Great
Firewall of China".

To create the music, Donnarumma first sifted through dozens of
papers to find a list of websites blacklisted by China. He selected
the IP addresses of the twelve websites that are most frequently
screened out by the Chinese censor.

The IP numbers are listed in a text file which is turned into
MIDI data and fed into a polyphonic synthesiser.
The IP addresses are translated into notes formed by several
voices, and then ordered by the amount of pages the Great Firewall
obscures for each IP address -- the more pages that are censored,
the closer to the start of the composition they come.

China's web censorship programme launched in 1998 and involves
the large-scale use of web technologies such as IP blocking, DNS
filtering and redirection, URL filtering and connection resetting,
to censor specific topics -- mostly relating to China's politics
and history.

According to We Make Money Not Art, in a talk at electronic art event
Piksel the artist was keen to point out that censorship is not
unique to China and that countries including Australia,
Finland, the UK and Italy have all made attempts to censor online content.